Columbine High School

Theresa Miller, 44, a Columbine High School teacher who ran through the hallways warning people during the 1999 massacre there, died Monday of colon cancer in Littleton, Colo. The diagnosis came a few months after two students attacked the school on April 20, 1999, setting off explosives and killing 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves. Ms. Miller extinguished a fire started by a pipe bomb, led students to safety and stayed with fellow teacher Dave Sanders as he died from gunshot wounds.

Given that some sort of horrific, headline-grabbing school shooting now occurs in the United States at a rate of once a week, it's hard to argue against the idea that gun violence is as much a national pastime as baseball. Unlike baseball, however, the season never ends. In just the last couple of weeks, troubled loners brought guns and death to a college campus in Seattle and a high school near Portland, and a couple of anti-government misfits went on a deadly rampage in Las Vegas.

Chesapeake Music Hall is planning a supper club cabaret evening May 14 to raise money for the families of victims of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.The music hall has doubled its admission price to $10 for the night, and will donate all the money from the gate to the Jefferson Memorial Fund, created to help victims' families with funeral, counseling and other expenses. Those who want to can pay the usual $5 admission fee, and that money also will go to the fund.Fifteen people died and 21 were injured when two students opened fire on their classmates and a teacher before killing themselves April 20 at Columbine High School.

In the year before he walked out of a dressing room at a Columbia Mall skate shop and proceeded to shoot two store clerks to death before taking his own life, Darion Marcus Aguilar had methodically researched the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and collected hundreds of violent video images on his computer. He also scoured the Internet for articles about mental illness and told his doctor he was hearing voices in his head. But family and friends told police they detected nothing amiss.

A bomb threat forced the evacuation of Prince George's County schools and administrative offices yesterday afternoon. After a search of all school campuses and offices, police could find no bombs, said Lynn McCawley, a school system spokeswoman. Schools will open today as usual. Students at most schools in the 137,000-student system had been dismissed before officials ordered evacuation at 2:50 p.m., she said. After-school activities and events were canceled. Police are investigating the bomb threat, which was called in at 1:54 p.m. to the county's 911 center, said police spokesman Lt. Steve Yuen.

By Jean Marbella and Jon Morgan and Jean Marbella and Jon Morgan,SUN NATIONAL STAFF | April 25, 1999

LITTLETON, Colo. -- Already, in this brief yet endless week, the weather has cycled through several seasons: Warm enough Tuesday that many of the students who fled their school, hands on heads like prisoners of war, were wearing shorts. Wednesday, the skies emptied a bitter rain. And then it snowed, in big, wet flakes as cold as permanent winter.But now, the weather forecast promises that the sun will come out tomorrow.People here are dazed with grief and anger in the aftermath of the violent siege in which two students blazed their way through Columbine High School and killed 12 classmates and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.

AFTER the ribbons fade, after the dead are laid to rest, after the reporters drift away, the last casualty of the massacre at Columbine High School may turn out to be the idea of public school.Earlier generations understood that, in a nation as focused on the individual as ours, we need an institution where children would learn to regard themselves as people in common.After Littleton, Colo., who wonders about Yugoslavia? The most Balkanized region of America may well be the high school, where teen-agers segregate themselves, each group with its own -- jocks, skinheads, blacks, surfers, nerds, etc. What happened in Littleton -- the Gothics vs. the jocks -- was a kind of ethnic cleansing.

A computer service that would allow students to anonymously report brewing violence, suicidal friends or bullying incidents without fear of retribution is being considered by the Anne Arundel school district. Officials are looking into subscribing to an Internet program, Report-it.com, that was created soon after the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999. The program, used in about a dozen states, could improve communication about safety issues between students and adults, said Jane W. Beckett, a school district spokeswoman.

By Justin George and Jessica Anderson, The Baltimore Sun | March 12, 2014

The teenager who led a deadly January assault at The Mall in Columbia did not target his victims, but planned a killing spree inspired by the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, Howard County police revealed Wednesday. In a wide-ranging news conference that provided new details about the crime, police said Darion Marcus Aguilar was torn between violent impulses and efforts to treat his psychiatric problems. For months before the Jan. 25 incident, the 19-year-old had been frequenting websites that promoted violence and researching mass shootings on the Internet.

By Justin George and Jessica Anderson, The Baltimore Sun | March 12, 2014

The teenager who led a deadly January assault at The Mall in Columbia did not target his victims, but planned a killing spree inspired by the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, Howard County police revealed Wednesday. In a wide-ranging news conference that provided new details about the crime, police said Darion Marcus Aguilar was torn between violent impulses and efforts to treat his psychiatric problems. For months before the Jan. 25 incident, the 19-year-old had been frequenting websites that promoted violence and researching mass shootings on the Internet.

Columbine By Dave Cullen Twelve / 420 pages / $26.99 Forget everything you thought you knew. The girl who professed her faith in God before being gunned down in the library. The Trenchcoat Mafia and the feud between the goths and jocks. The idea that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold - the two Columbine High School seniors who, on April 20, 1999, killed 12 of their fellow students and one teacher in what was, at the time, the worst school shooting in the history of the United States - were disaffected, unpopular and motivated by resentment or revenge.

Since the killings at Columbine High School seven years ago, schools have locked their doors, posted adults at entryways and drilled students in emergency procedures. The result, say experts, has been an increase in safety, but there remains little that can be done to stop a distraught outsider intent on killing children. William Pollack, a Harvard University professor who has done studies of school shootings, estimates that a child in this country has a one-in-a-million chance of being shot in an attack or suicide at a school.

Night had already cloaked the valley by the time I arrived, and snow had started falling, gently as it does in the mountains in springtime. Under the twin covers of darkness and snowfall, I didn't realize until the next morning just how beautiful and idyllic Littleton, Col., was. Ever since April 20, 1999, though, the name Littleton brings to mind a different picture entirely. It has become synonymous with the deadliest school shooting ever in the U.S., the town where two Columbine High School students opened fire and killed 12 classmates and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves.

A bomb threat forced the evacuation of Prince George's County schools and administrative offices yesterday afternoon. After a search of all school campuses and offices, police could find no bombs, said Lynn McCawley, a school system spokeswoman. Schools will open today as usual. Students at most schools in the 137,000-student system had been dismissed before officials ordered evacuation at 2:50 p.m., she said. After-school activities and events were canceled. Police are investigating the bomb threat, which was called in at 1:54 p.m. to the county's 911 center, said police spokesman Lt. Steve Yuen.

Theresa Miller, 44, a Columbine High School teacher who ran through the hallways warning people during the 1999 massacre there, died Monday of colon cancer in Littleton, Colo. The diagnosis came a few months after two students attacked the school on April 20, 1999, setting off explosives and killing 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves. Ms. Miller extinguished a fire started by a pipe bomb, led students to safety and stayed with fellow teacher Dave Sanders as he died from gunshot wounds.

GOLDEN, Colo. -- Videotapes made by two teen-agers as they planned a shooting massacre and their suicides at Columbine High School show them to be filled with hateful rage, hoping to kill 250 people, yet sympathetic to their parents for what they would soon endure. "They're going to be put through hell once we do this," one of the killers, Eric Harris, said of his parents in the last of several tapes he made with Dylan Klebold. And as if to exonerate their parents from any guilt, remorse or responsibility, Harris quietly quotes Shakespeare: "Good wombs have borne bad sons."

LITTLETON, Colo. -- As police began yesterday to remove the bodies of the victims of Tuesday's deadly rampage at Columbine High School, a picture began to emerge of a chillingly calculated killing spree by two heavily armed teen-agers.Police said the scheme was so elaborate that they suspect the killers -- identified as Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17 -- had accomplices in carrying out their apparent "suicide mission."When the shooting and bombing were over Tuesday, 14 students, including the two killers, and one teacher were dead -- a total 10 lower than initial police estimates.

A computer service that would allow students to anonymously report brewing violence, suicidal friends or bullying incidents without fear of retribution is being considered by the Anne Arundel school district. Officials are looking into subscribing to an Internet program, Report-it.com, that was created soon after the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999. The program, used in about a dozen states, could improve communication about safety issues between students and adults, said Jane W. Beckett, a school district spokeswoman.

A "cloud of fear" has swept the land in the year since the shootings at Columbine High School, obscuring an important fact: Schools -- nationally and in Maryland -- suffer less violence than ever, and harsh security measures taken by educators have done more harm than good. These are conclusions reached in a national report -- with a focus on Maryland and Massachusetts -- released yesterday by a Washington-based policy group. The report from the Justice Policy Institute contrasts two statistics: A child's chances of being killed at school are one in 2 million.